Blackberry is continuing to send out more mixed messages about its handset future.

For a while now Blackberry has been getting more hacked off with the amount of money it spends staying in a market where no one wants it. Its CEO has said that if the hardware side of the business did not pick up by the end of the year he would walk away.

Then it turned out that Blackberry was working on three new Android handsets at least one of which will not be seen until next year. With all this Android being thought about, there was no room for the Blackberry OS 10 so it had been hinted that the company was abandoning it.

Now BlackBerry’s COO Marty Beard has formally denied backing away from BB10 and that the “company’s never said that we would not build another BB10 device”.

Technically that is true as BlackBerry has never said that it would give up on BB10. But it is not exactly releasing a new BB10 machine and multiple Android devices being Blackberry’s last handset chance it is hard to see what the company is playing at.

If it is thinking about releasing a BB10, it will not be until 2017 which means that Blackberry has suddenly changed its mind and is staying in the handset business at least until next year.

Confused? Yeah so are we. Blackberry’s lack of a BB10 phone this year cost it a big US government contract. In fact the US government was one of the few places where the phone company could be guaranteed sales. It would have been better slipping out one of these instead of wasting all that effort on its overpriced Priv phones.One of the reasons for people giving up on Blackberry is that they don't want to invest in tech which even the company thinks is doomed.

As we expected, Blackberry has given up on its BB10 operating system and will no longer make phones which use it.

CEO John Chen said said if it is going to bother with mobiles at all, it might as well try to be an Android device manufacturer which is focused on Enterprise rather than consumer handsets.

He added that BlackBerry will continue to support BB10 for owners of existing devices "for a minimum of two years" but the company will not be utilising the operating system on future devices.

BlackBerry 10 has been on the ropes for a while, with WhatsApp and Facebook recently withdrawing support for the platform. Chen and Blackberry have always denied that it was going to be killed off. In fact blackberry fanboys always get miffed when we hinted that it was inevitable. When the Priv arrived, it was the equivalent of a bloke showing photos of his wife and kids in a war movie and saying he was really looking forward to coming home and being with them.

Blackberry has been quick to tell us that a story we ran which quoted one of its senior managers as saying that the BBOS was toast "needs up-dating."

While it was true that Damian Tay, BlackBerry's senior director for product management for the APAC region did say that BlackBerry was in the process of transitioning to a single platform ecosystem, and that will all revolve around Android, it might have been that he should not have said that.

Blackberry’s PR has been on the blower to point out that its blog shows its commitment to the Blackberry 10 OS.

Ironically the blog is about the launch of the Android Priv in India which is not a normal place to show a fierce dedication to the older BBOS.

The blog quote mentions the commitment to the Blackberry 10OS was the following:

“But while PRIV on secured Android offers a choice in OS to new and existing customers, we want to also make very clear our ongoing commitment to the BlackBerry 10 platform, which enables industry-leading security and productivity benefits. As we’ve said before, consumer and enterprise fans of our workhorse BlackBerry 10 smartphones such as Passport, Classic and others can look forward to multiple security and privacy enhancements in 2016.”

Clear enough? Sort of. But that was not really what Tay was talking about in fact he made it clear that the Passport and the Classic would be around for a while. But he did say that it doesn't make practical sense to have two platforms at the same time competing with each other and ultimately Blackberry’s secure version of Android would win out.

Apple is attracting more new mobile users in the US than Android, but in spite of that Cupertino’s share price is still in a downward spiral for no obvious reason.

The latest ComScore report found that Apple’s iPhone gained ground on Android between November and January. Android is still the dominant platform, with a 52.3 percent market share, but its share dropped 1.3 percent. Apple is at 37.8 percent, but its share has gone up by 3.5 percent.

The Apple - Google duopoly is still going strong. Blacberry’s share slipped from 7.8 percent to 5.9 percent, while Microsoft’s share is stagnant, 3.1 percent, down from 3.2 percent in October. Symbian is still used on 0.5 percent of handsets, down from 0.6 percent in October.

The number of new Blackberry users also went down, but it should be noted that the three-month period covered in the survey ended just as BB10 was about to roll out.